


sinner's prayer

by xiuzhe (orphan_account)



Category: Catacomb Prince (Visual Novel)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22505245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/xiuzhe
Summary: In eleven months, Prince Vitali will die.
Kudos: 1





	sinner's prayer

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the _Puppet Ruler_ ending. The game is available as [a free download](https://skeleteam.itch.io/catacombprince) on itch.io.

In eleven months, Prince Vitali will die.

If one can believe that which is already dead is able to die, of course. Once, detached from the concept by youthful hubris, Vitali did not ponder what came with the expiry of the body, or after. He did not wonder as to the existence of a soul, and whether, wound to the sinew, it too would be snuffed out, or if it lingered on, the sum of a person’s very life, unaccountable in the tally of their parts. 

He was none the wiser, now, as to the answer. When he had awoken, he had thought— he was still the man he was, all of which composed him still innate, even with his flesh stripped from his bones, with five years lost between sleeping and waking. That memories were held beyond the mind. No matter how he might appear, how he might be mechanised, something unspeakable that could not be taken from him served as the tether to lead him back home.

When his mother had told the court he was nothing more than a replica, he doubted the tenuous belief in his reality that had kept him grounded through the passing weeks. If he had nothing else, Vitali had thought he at least had— 

But, ah. Perhaps not.

In eleven months, Prince Vitali will die. Until then, the Courts will mete their justice slower than the turn of the seasons, pantomiming the hunt for his murderer while they ascend his aunt to the throne.

He is his people’s prince; he is his kingdom’s greatest clue; he is his family’s vilest shame. Within a year, he will be mourned. Within a year, he will be nothing at all.

For all it is, it will not come a day sooner. Until then… 

Until then, Vitali is free, should he not beat his wings overly much within his gilded cage.

* * *

Surrender, eventually, brings him to the church.

It is not so suspect that his wardens move to refuse him, but the court bickers amongst themselves about it all the same for days after. They do not permit him to go again, not until they’ve woven the tale that will best keep their appearances, should people begin to question where the prince has uncovered his interest in the faith.

And so, once a week, the shroud of diplomacy pooled over his many other guises, Vitali makes the trip to pray. For the first few visits, he can bring himself to do no more than kneel, head silent but for the sounds his gems thread into it, of the crackle of his clothes and the drip of wax from the candles. He cannot remember the rites. He does not feel entitled to beg for deliverance, anyway, let alone from a God that has held only his disinterest, at best.

Still, the stares of the priests are not as heavy as the stares that follow him elsewhere, and they are laden with a knowing that does not damn him so terribly. How ironic, he would think, if he cared to think anymore at all.

* * *

One afternoon, when the winds have gentled and the sun has taken to leaving his jerkin warm to the living touch within minutes of leaving his carriage, the High Priest is in attendance. Vitali goes to his knees at the altar, as he always does, now, a puppet propelled by well-plucked strings, and dips his chin to spare himself a second more of the sight of Raziel’s sneer.

“Even now your transgressions know no shame.” The spit of his words is in violent contrast to the steady pinch of his gnarled fingers around the stem of a match.

“I am here only to pray,” says Vitali. It is truer than any other lie he’s brought here.

Raziel bares the few of his teeth that are left, candlelight casting the enamel in a more repulsive yellow light. They gleam like knives, held aloft over the black pit of his mouth.

“You are an abomination,” Raziel snaps back, then stops. He has said crueller things to and of Vitali before, with less of a care for who might hear, but it seems the presence of his God is its own chastisement.

The ruby charading as his stomach churns. “Can abominations not pray?” Vitali asks, masking his sincerity with sardonicism. The gamble pays out: Raziel’s temper flares, and he slams down the candelabra he had so dutifully gone to light, the rush of air extinguishing his match.

“You _dare_?” he roars, so shrilly that it is almost a shriek, the words erupting through the chapel.

Vitali waits for more, but is left wanting. Raziel’s beady eyes dart over the prince’s shoulder and he yanks his jaw shut, snarling. Beneath the fan of his ornate mask, Vitali can see the reddened mottle of his cheekbones, blood boiling up to the surface of his skin.

A civil man would cease; a reasonable man would repent. Vitali is neither, anymore, and perhaps never was, at all, and in having nothing left not worth losing, he persists. “I thought your God forgave all who asked.”

“Not _monsters_ ,” says Raziel.

Vitali’s knees creak as he rises, protesting, and something unnamable spurs him to smother the sound by sweeping his palms down his chest, smoothing the plush fabric.

“Funny,” he remarks as he turns to depart, “your joining of the faith must have inspired that change of policy.”

* * *

When Vitali returns the following week, he is again greeted by the sight of Raziel. Vitali goes to his knees at the altar, and cannot lower his face enough to miss the High Priest striding across the chapel, flicking his hand with increasing severity to dismiss the attendant closest to the prince.

“Are you so lacking in entertainment that fooling around in my church is all you can devise to fill your time?” is the first thing Raziel says to him, the moment he has assumed his subordinate’s place.

“They don’t afford many leisures to prisoners, Raziel,” Vitali answers, “and I am hardly _fooling_.”

“You are hardly worshipping,” Raziel counters. He plucks up a cloth and resumes dusting, but the motions are absent, distracted, his ratty fingernails catching on the fabric as his fingers circle in thought. “What else would you have me call it?”

His tone is rough, as Vitali has always known it to be, but it is strangely lacking in the knife’s edge that he is used to having pointed at him within any and all of their fraught interactions. Vitali pauses, and wishes he had a tongue to roll around his mouth, to abate the impression of dryness that is setting in.

“I am trying,” he answers eventually. “To pray. Worship. Whatever you choose to call it.”

Raziel turns to look at him over the broad hill of his shoulder, mouth thin, too placid for Vitali to read with the mask over his eyes, obscuring any additional hint as to his mood. It’s unsettling. “You have no faith, you know not the rites. What do you hope to accomplish, other than tormenting me?”

“ _Tormenting_ you?!” Vitali blurts out, before the gem of his brain can catch the impulse and temper it with sense. He lurches forward, one boot drawing out to plant on the ground to brace his weight as the coil of his frame readies to spring upward the remainder of the way.

“It is all you do!” Raziel jerks so violently that Vitali is honestly surprised he is able to reel back the force in his body enough not to slam his hands down on the wood before him, though his whole body quakes with the effort. “All you have ever done, since you first came to know me, is torment me!”

Vitali stutters, wordless, until Raziel’s anger bleeds over into him and stokes the dormant flame of his own fury back to life. “I was a child! An awful child, if you will, but a child! I hardly knew better!”

But he had known better, hadn’t he? Raziel had been an appealing target for him, ugly and common and all too easy to provoke. His faith was as laughable to him as the sheer idea of pulling someone off the street and wiping their slate clean, as if belief and forgiveness could buff out any impurities. Vitali hadn’t needed to know who Raziel was before he became Raziel; the real man beneath had shone through the guise, savage and forceful.

Even now Vitali doesn’t think he owes Raziel any apologies. Raziel had never been helpless.

“What does it matter?” Vitali continues, voice splitting through the sprawl of the silence after what feels like another lifetime. “I am only a pretender. Lash me as you like, but it won’t reach the prince you despise.”

Raziel turns away. He says nothing more, leaving Vitali to wonder, even after he has left the church and put everything but from his mind, if the conversation is truly done.

* * *

A higher calling draws Raziel away soon after, and though it makes for less eventful reflection for Vitali in the church, the High Priest’s absence also loosens the tongues of many in the palace who seem to fear attracting his audience.

Vitali finds after a week that while the gossip is hastily hushed in his direct presence, he does not have to conceal himself with any particular subtlety in order to eavesdrop, and his wardens see nothing objectionable in loitering on royal grounds.

Raziel is not the most interesting of the court’s cast Vitali hears about, but he is the one he is most interested in hearing about. There is much to sift through, at first, but as he does, he finds the contents to be more slander than substance, and the entire endeavour takes a Sisyphean turn. The days stumble on, and on, and he learns nothing new at all.

Until.

“Isn’t the High Priest expected back this evening?” Vitali overhears. Though the scullery maid is keeping her tone hushed, her head bowed towards her friend, he can pick her words up from down the sprawling hall. He doesn’t slow his steps, not expecting much to come of their chatter.

“Is he?” the other girl replies, either too young or too bold to conceal the disgust in her voice. “I wish they’d keep that brute out in the far provinces.”

Vitali does slow himself, with that, until his feet stop underneath him entirely.

“He’s gotten better,” says the first, her short fingers clutching at the other girl’s sleeve, as if in warning to be mindful. “So I’ve heard.”

Her friend leans in, nose scrunched up and eyes thin. “He beat that acolyte to the verge of death not even that long ago. I don’t care what anyone says; men like that don’t get better. They get _worse_.”

Vitali slowly lifts his hand, his gloved palm smoothing up his nape to cup the back of his head. He thinks, distantly, of the sound of grass crunching beneath his boots, the muffled warble of voices, the snippets of music not lost on the breeze. He thinks, distantly, of the shock of pain, blossoming like a flower from the garden bed of his skull as the bone splintered and crumbled beneath a blow.

He thinks— no.

Surely— surely not.

* * *

High Priest Raziel returns, in much the state as he left. Vitali cannot say the same for himself.

The thing is— the thing is, of course, now, Vitali suspects. He suspects so severely and with such conviction it stops just short in his mind of _faith_. Who else could have done this to him? Who else would have dared?

Vitali gains nothing from confronting him, just as Raziel has already taken anything he might have once stood to lose.

The burden of his killer’s identity would not have helped him all those months ago, he has come to realise. No manner of proof will help him now.

And so, he waits.

* * *

Vitali presents himself at the church for the very last time. He goes to his knees at the altar, beneath the eyes of his watchers, who will be rid of his burden no later than midafternoon. It will look to be the perfect accident. He will be dead without a hitch. He bows his head, clasps his hands together, and says, in a voice so quiet none but he and Raziel and Raziel’s God will hear, “I know that you did it.”

High Priest Raziel’s fingers tighten down, snapping the unlit match cinched between them. Even having divulged his own guilt in that instant, he still dares to ask, “What?”

“I know,” says Vitali, staring up at him over the brim of his mask, “that you killed me.”

When Raziel turns to face him, his expression is, for once, in all the years Vitali has ever known and known of him, inscrutable. He does not deny it. He does not speak a word.

“I hope,” says Vitali, when the pointed silence has dragged for so long between their bodies as to have developed a tangible edge, “that it earned you all you hoped to gain from it.”

Vitali has to shield his eyes from the turn of Raziel’s expression; the thinning of his mouth, the sag of his shoulders. The hint of something truly remorseful and utterly human in his eyes. It is too repugnant a sight for him to bear.

He had thought— almost, perhaps. That they had almost reached an accord; that they could perhaps come to a mutual closure. High Priest Raziel’s betrayals of him truly are as uncountable as they are unforgivable.

Vitali rises to his feet, chin still slanted beneath the weight of Raziel’s gaze, held in place by the noose drawing taut around his neck. Still, Raziel does not speak. Vitali finds himself absurdly glad for this, for he is not sure what else his broken self can stand to take.

“I hope,” says Vitali, finally, at last, as he turns away, “that your God can exonerate you of these sins, too.”

“She will not,” Raziel rasps, low, more to himself than to the span of Vitali’s back. 

It is no apology; it is no admittance. It is hardly anything at all. 

Vitali damns him as he departs, with every fibre of his unholy construct, just for that.


End file.
